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“Civil War II” Sells Over 500K Copies in June, “Batman” Cracks 400K

Below you’ll find the sales estimates for comics and trade paperbacks sold in the direct market for June, 2016. The sales numbers below are estimates based on the information provided by Diamond Comics Distributors earlier this month. Sales estimates for May, 2016 can be found here.

There are a couple of things to keep in mind when reading this data. These numbers are just estimates for the sales through Diamond to direct market retailers. It does not include any sales outside of the Diamond channel such as newstands, book stores or overseas markets. Since the majority of habitual comic book readers are served through this sales channel, these numbers are a good indicator of the core sales trends at the retail level. While not all copies will sell to readers, each retailer is buying what they think they can sell so the trends at the retail level should be a close enough reflection of the sales trends at the reader level for the purposes of discussion.

The breakdowns are for just the top comics and top trades listed below. These are not the overall market share. I only deal with numbers that I can see and kick around in my ever evolving number crunching system. Sometimes the numbers get a bit battered and bruised in the process.

The estimated total sales for the 300 comics was 8,531,976 comics which is up by 2,160,089 units from May and up by 1,047,952 units from June 2015. Marvel Comics had the largest percentage of the top 300 comics with 47.00% of the total units sold followed by DC Comics with 36.61%.

The top selling comic from Marvel Comics was “Civil War II (2016)” #1 in slot 1 with an estimated 381,737 units and for DC Comics was “Batman (2016) *” #1 in rank 2 with an estimated 280,360 units.

The estimated total sales for the 300 trades was 483,436 trades which is up by 142,553 units from May and up by 75,626 units from June 2015.

Topping the trades list in June was “Saga v6” by Image Comics with 25,585 units.

I’ll be back later with an analysis of the numbers below.

If you’d like to listen to an in-depth discussion of the sales data, check out the Mayo Report episodes of the Comic Book Page podcast at www.ComicBookPage.com. In addition to those episodes, every Monday is a Weekly Comics Spotlight episode featuring a comic by DC, a comic by Marvel and a comic by some other publisher. I read around 200 new comics a month so we cover a wide variety of what is current being published. If you are looking for more or different comics to read, check out the latest Previews Spotlight episode which features clips from various comic book fans talking about the comics they love. With thousands of comics in Previews every month, Previews Spotlight episodes are a great way to find out about things which may have flown under your comic book radar.